[TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Mark,

> Mike Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford University Press
> back in the early 1980s on secondment from IBM.  It had a rather
> elegant ability to switch between markup mode and rendering mode so
> you could peek at how something would look.

I think that's his LEXX editor which did live parsing and could be
initialised with parsing tables.

    LEXX — A programmable structured editor
    DOI:10.1147/rd.311.0073
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224103825_LEXX-A_programmable_structured_editor

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEXX_(text_editor)

> I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous task of converting
> the OED from its old paper-based production framework to the
> electronic system that they use today

Collins, a rival in dictionaries, used troff for a long time to produce
theirs.  Don't know what they do now.

The University of Nottingham chose device-independent troff for their
examination papers over TeX because the PDP-11 was affordable compared
to the VAX.  The troff source licence cost £4,000 around ’82.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28692919_In-house_Preparation_of_Examination_Papers_using_troff_tbl_and_eqn


> Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy

For markdown, the CommonMark folk have been improving this for a while.

    ‘We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for
     Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate
     Markdown implementations against this specification.  We believe
     this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.

    ‘That’s what we call CommonMark.’

        — https://commonmark.org

> the ease of creating crazy markup like <h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in
> edit mode makes for some difficult exception handling problems.

Just treat it as an error rather than attempt recovery?  Although the
rendered version could be flipped to, or viewed in parallel, it would be
read only and only get so far; the bug would need fixing in the mark-up
view.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.